The Narcissist Test: How to spot outsized egos ... and the surprising things we can learn from them. Dr Malkin Craig

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СКАЧАТЬ scholar Hillel the Elder summarized the dilemma this way: “If I am not for myself, who am I? And if I am only for myself, then what am I?” To remain healthy and happy, we all need a certain amount of investment in ourselves. We need a voice, a presence of our own, to make an impact on the world and people around us or else, like Echo, we eventually become nothing at all.

      We all sail between the Scylla of enervating self-denial and Charybdis of soul-killing self-importance. That’s what narcissism is really all about—and you’ll learn how to safely navigate the passage as we go along. But first, we have to untangle a mystery. If feeling special can be good for us, how on earth did we end up so obsessed with the idea that it’s bad? Why are we so focused on the dangers of narcissism?

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       Confusion and Controversy

      How Narcissism Became a Dirty Word and We Found an Epidemic

      Many years ago, a close friend of mine, Tara, called me about an incident with her father and her two-year-old daughter, Nina. They’d been out for a stroll in the park when Nina suddenly became unglued, screaming and wailing to go home. Tara did what she could, but Nina remained inconsolable. After about half an hour, Tara announced, “We have to go, I’m sorry.” Her father shot her a stern look, warning: “If you leave every time she pitches a fit, she’ll think the world revolves around her!” Tara, fuming, fired back. “Yes. Yes, she will. And I think that’s a good thing! Don’t you?”

      On the surface, this father-daughter quarrel was a generational battle over how to raise a child. But at a deeper level, their argument reflects two radically different views of human nature. Tara’s dad seems to believe people are easily corruptible, requiring constant reining in to avoid becoming hopelessly self-centered, while Tara thinks we’re all made of sturdier stuff and actually benefit from a little self-absorption now and then. The first position inevitably adopts a rather dim view of humanity, the latter a more optimistic one.

      Without realizing it, Tara and her father had squared off in one of the oldest debates in history, one that’s central to the confusion surrounding narcissism today.

      The Birth of Narcissism

      Long before the word narcissism had been coined, philosophers fought just as fiercely as Tara and her father over the place of the self in our moral priorities.

      In 350 BC, Aristotle posed a question—“Who should the good man love more? Himself, or others?”—and answered it: “The good man is particularly selfish.” In India two centuries earlier, the Buddha had spread the opposite view: The self is an illusion, a trick our minds play on us to make us think we matter. Buddhism suggested that this illusory self should never be our primary focus. Four centuries after Aristotle, Christian teachings added a negative fillip: making too much of oneself constitutes the sin of pride (and a quick path to hell). Excesses of the self underlie other sins—sloth, greed, gluttony, and envy—as well.

      Down through the centuries, the debate raged, engaging philosophers from Thomas Hobbes (self-love is part of brutish human nature) to Adam Smith (self-interest benefits society, aka “greed is good”). It wasn’t until the end of the 19th century, however, that the debate entered into the circles of medicine and psychology and the word narcissism first appeared. In 1898 pioneering British sexologist Havelock Ellis described patients who’d literally fallen in love with themselves, sprinkling their bodies with kisses from their own lips and masturbating to excess, as suffering from a “Narcissus-like” ailment. One year later, a German doctor, Paul Näcke, writing about similar “sexual perversions,” coined the catchier term narcissism. But it was the founding father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, who in 1914 made the word famous in a groundbreaking paper: On Narcissism: An Introduction. He liberated the term from its sexual connotations (unusual for him), describing narcissism, instead, as a necessary developmental stage of childhood.

      As infants, Freud wrote, we’re convinced the world originates in us, at least all the exciting parts of it. We literally fall in love with ourselves, giddy with all the fascinating and sexy things we seem capable of. He called this stage “primary narcissism,” and felt it wasn’t just healthy, but also crucial to our capacity to form meaningful, close relationships. Our passion for ourselves as infants gives us the energy to reach out to others. We have to overestimate our own importance in the universe before we can see anyone else as important.

      But Freud didn’t know quite what to make of narcissism beyond infancy. Was it good or bad for adults? On the one hand, he felt that narcissism and love were closely linked; lovers often raise each other on a pedestal above the rest of humanity. He also pointed to charismatic leaders and innovators as proof that individuals who feel special can bring tremendous good to the world. But he was quick to condemn adult narcissism as well. If we don’t let go of the childhood fascination with ourselves, he cautioned, it can lead to vanity (in his view found chiefly in women) and to serious mental illness, severing us from reality and turning us into delusional megalomaniacs. Freud’s dual views on adult narcissism generated enormous confusion and set the stage for a crackling duel nearly fifty years later between two giants in mental health: Heinz Kohut and Otto Kernberg.

      Both men were born in Vienna to Jewish families and both trained as psychoanalysts. But they came of age under vastly different circumstances. Kohut, born in 1913, knew a Vienna full of hope and prosperity, brimming with rich artistic tradition and teeming with intellectual fervor. The advent of Hitler and the Third Reich changed all that. Soon after the annexation of Austria in 1938, Kohut fled his beloved city for England and then America, where he settled in 1940. Born in 1928, fifteen years after Kohut, Kernberg grew up in a grim and ominous Vienna in the shadow of encroaching Nazism. When he was 10 years old, he and his family fled to Chile, where Kernberg spent the next twenty years, far away from the home he’d once known; he moved to the United States in 1959. The two men’s contrasting experiences seem to have colored their views of human nature. Darkness pervades Kernberg’s view, while hope suffuses Kohut’s.

      The Rise of Healthy Narcissism

      As a young psychoanalyst, Heinz Kohut, like Freud, quickly earned a reputation for brilliance as a clinician, researcher, and teacher/lecturer. (He was renowned for his ability to commit entire therapy session transcripts to memory and to deliver compelling talks without a single note to prompt him.) Throughout most of his career, he remained one of Freud’s staunchest defenders. But in the 1970s, he split from the orthodox Freudian community to found an entirely new school of thought, Self Psychology, devoted to understanding how people develop a healthy (or unhealthy) self-image.

      Kohut believed that Freud had stumbled by placing sex and aggression at the center of human experience. It’s not our baser instincts that drive us, Kohut argued; rather, it’s our need to develop a solid sense of self. And for that, he said, we don’t just need other people; we need narcissism. Freud had all but elevated self-reliance to the level of virtue. We should be fully autonomous as adults, declared the master, demanding neither approval nor admiration. But where Freud saw narcissism as a mark of immaturity, an infantile dependency to be outgrown, Kohut saw it as vital to well-being throughout life. Even as adults, we need to depend on others from time to time—to look up to them, to enjoy their admiration, to turn to them for comfort and satisfaction.

      Young children only feel like they matter—only feel like they exist—when their parents make them feel special. Parents who pay attention to their children’s inner lives—their hopes and dreams, their sadness and fears, and most of all their need for admiration—provide the “mirroring” necessary for the child to develop a healthy sense of self. But young children also need to idolize their parents. Seeing their mother and father as perfect helps them weather the storms every fledgling self goes through СКАЧАТЬ